Asobu, Asobu
by LawlietLennoxLove
Summary: Tokyo Year Zero/Hetalia cross. Honda Kiku waits in the back streets of the wrecked city that has no front streets, and this one is only as shady as the rest of them. Waits in the fleshpots, if you will, except there's hardly any flesh and any that's left is eaten away by the lice and the disease and their own skeletons. And the Victors, who despite it all seem to want it anyway.


**A/N: In keeping with my recent plunder of charity shops, I bought Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace on my way home yesterday, and finished it this morning…and **_**my God **_**that is one powerful book. And I now have a new aim in life: to read the rest of the trilogy. **

**And so I shamelessly filched the writing style (I took one look at it in the shop and I thought '…what….' but it's surprisingly effective) and setting (a ruined Tokyo, August 1946) and just about everything else. Even the sound effects. Potsu-potsu. It's raining where I am now, but what do you expect, it's England.**

**It isn't very **_**Hetalia**_**. It could be any Alfred and Kiku. Which is how it is, no?**

**Warnings: Well…mass prostitution, non-explicit sex, barely-there racial slurs that are not my views, worry not.**

**Enjoy. And read Tokyo Year Zero if you haven't already. Or you'll find yourself pretty much not understanding which would just be so sad…**_**read it read it read it…!**_

Asobu, Asobu…?

"_Asobu, asobu…?"_

It's raining, raining the grey of dust and defeat and corpses and stench that rises like flies, potsu-potsu zā-zā pilā-palā pitter-patter, different sounds to the different people who pass through the ramshackle rotting crumbling street in Tokyo Tochigi Ienaka Niregi Kanasaki all one and the same, all broken roads and cracked telegraph poles and shattered windows and the smell of typhoid and the dead, the gaunt dead that crawl and starve and wait behind the shattered windows and broken roads for food food _food_, calling out their only ware, filthy and diseased and lice-ridden because they're the survivors and they need _food_.

"_Asobu, asobu, asobu…?"_

_Yellow skin sticking to white bones under torn chemises and canvas shoes. Pink eyes, red eyes, yellow eyes, living skulls, dead skulls–_

"_Asobu, asobu-?"_

–_With the dead?_

They come looking for the same thing, brown eyes black eyes blue eyes and mouths that leer that they can kill these masterless dogs and they have and could again because they are Victors and no-one will stop them and no one will charge them but that's not what they came looking for.

_Potsu-potsu zā-zā, he is lucky and perhaps he will be lucky again tonight…_

Asobu, asobu, they are calling from the end of the street, calling crying keening wailing, there is one coming.

_He is lucky he has no wife to support, no children and no family and no mistress and no bastards but plenty of lovers that keep him in cosmetics and rags and the body he drags to work with him–_

_They are Victors and no-one will stop them laughing– _

_Laughing as he follows them in his woman's yukata and wooden getas warped with rot with the rest of the procession–_

_Wailing asobu, asobu…_

"Asobu, asobu, asobu…?"

He pitches in with the clamour that dogs the Victor, he assumes it's a Victor, he's not interested in seeing, only in the Victor seeing him so that he could stand a chance.

He pushes, he shoves, he slips between folds of coarse rags, he tramples on others' bare feet with his getas, and manages to reach the epicentre of the desperate clamour. Washed yellow hair and clear blue eyes and clean white skin under the brand-new uniform. He tugs at a crisp hem, smears it with dirt and infects it with lice probably, but he doesn't care and it catches the Victor's attention at least.

The Victor turns, and he is young, twenty-one at the most, clear skin surrounded by a pack of putrid ones.

"Asobu, Joe…?" he says, now that he's caught his attention.

The Victor looks round, nervously, at the pack of ravenous dogs around him, and shakes his head.

He begins to curse–

"Not Joe," the Victor says, "Alfred."

_He is lucky, he is lucky…_

"What's your name?"

He stares at the naivety of the question, the ridiculous question, who would ask such a useless thing?

…At such a time?

He feels the ground against his back, he feels the ground dig into his back, feels himself being forced into the ground, thinks of being buried alive.

He curses the American invading him.

_Potsu-potsu. Midorikawa Ryoku._

_Potsu-potsu. Kondo Kazuko._

_Potsu-potsu. Matsushita Yoshi._

_Potsu-potsu. Abe Yoshiko._

_Potsu-potsu. __Honda Kiku._

"Kodaira Yoshio," he says.

Thinking, _run_, _kuso_ American.

The Victor nods, and says nothing more of it.

So he hadn't been reading the papers, then.

_Kuso _American.

_The getas on their sides, the yukata slung without grace, without ceremony over the back of the chair–_

_The futon kicked away, crushed fleas and lice on the floor that he won't clean–_

_The Victor turning from him as he buttons up his nice, clean trousers, and he stares at his clothed back–_

_He lies on the floor, hands, stomach and thighs sticky, listens to the rain–_

…_Very good, Joe._

**Tokyo, August 1946. Honda Kiku waits in the back streets of the wrecked city that has no front streets, and this one is only as shady as the rest of them. Waits in the fleshpots, if you will, except there's hardly any flesh and any that's left is eaten away by the lice and the disease and their skeletons that become more and more prominent. And the Victors, who despite it all seems to want it anyway.**


End file.
